Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa became one of Latin America’s most important modernist authors in the 20th century and continues to write in the 21st. He was also a politically engaged writer and an unsuccessful Peruvian presidential candidate, who began with Karl Marx but drifted toward the market society of Milton Friedman. University of California Hispanic studies professor Raymond Leslie Williams provides a compact yet sufficiently detailed chronicle of Vargas Llosa’s creative life—a CliffsNotes of his work with telling anecdotes from his personal life. Williams identifies the multi-layered, intricate plots of William Faulkner as Vargas Llosa’s touchstone, and trauma as signposts from his formative years. A hatred of military school left him with a lifelong struggle against bullies and dictators, which took different forms as he became disenchanted with the idols of his youth.
